IT DIDN’T TAKE long for stories to spring up around Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Some people said that the photographers had taken too long getting their cameras set up to take the president’s picture, and that he was done before they could get a shot. Rumors spread that he had written the speech on the train on the back of an envelope—no, he had written it the night before the ceremony—no, he had written it while listening to Edward Everett’s oration—no, he made it up on the spot. It was as if people wanted to believe that magic had happened before their very eyes.
It’s true, Lincoln wrote the speech quickly: in just two weeks. But when he stood on the platform on that November afternoon, he had his finished speech, written in his own handwriting on stationery from his own office. From the moment he had left Washington for Gettysburg until almost the moment he gave the speech, Lincoln was busy working with his secretaries on other official business. He may have tinkered with it again after his arrival in Gettysburg, but there would have been no time for him to write a speech, even such a short one. And besides, it was too serious an occasion. Lincoln was not the sort of person to leave such an important speech to the last minute. He had been asked to make a few appropriate remarks, not a few casual words off the top of his head.
Back in Washington the president received a short note from Everett. “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”
Within days he had a request from Wills, in Gettysburg. Could he please have the original copy of the speech to keep with the documents related to the event? It wasn’t long before other people were asking for autographed copies of the speech. Lincoln sent a copy to a fund-raising auction to aid wounded soldiers in January, and he sent others out later. It had already become one of the most famous speeches of a war filled with speeches.
It has since become one of the most famous speeches of all time. Lincoln said “the world will little note nor long remember what we say here.”